The seven theses
The five proposals
Uploaded 20 September 2002
Introduction
Over the past two years, I’ve been experimenting in conference papers with what I’ve called the ‘Teutonic Theses About Border Genres’ and the ‘Modest Proposals About Docudrama’. The Theses started out five in number but have expanded to seven; the Proposals were three to begin with, but are now five. Before they increase further, I wanted to offer them up to the readers of Screening the Past in the same spirit I have offered them to successive ‘Visible Evidence’ conferences in the Netherlands (Utrecht/Amsterdam, 2000) and Australia (Brisbane, 2001). This is a spirit of speculative inquiry. They have never failed to provoke discussion (though I’m glad to say they have never resulted in the spilling of blood, as John Corner for one once feared they might!).
With only the excuse of the speculative enterprise, they come to you without the familiar paraphernalia of the academic essay – no carefully reasoned argument, no apparent theoretical underpinning, no footnotes, no bibliography. Ordinarily I delight in all these things, but the only aid I am offering as explanation for the origins of some of the ideas is this: designations bracketed thus (Name) refer to books/articles, while these [Name] to someone’s point in discussion following presentation of the work.
In this experimental departure from accepted practice I hope for continuation of such dialogue through email. To this end a link has been created at the end of each section for anyone who wants to challenge, dispute with, excoriate or otherwise interact with the Theses and Proposals. Even if you want to know what book (Name) wrote, or where [Name] said what I claim they said – just ask.
[Comments and answers to questions, after moderation, will be posted on the site to encourage further debate, so please check the site from time to time to monitor progress of debate. – ed.]
A colleague at Worcester remarked that the mix of the Lutheran and Swiftian characterised an attempt to be bold and subversive (God help me, I can do no other.): this is no more than the truth of the matter. Behind the Lutheran Theses lies a sober concern with documentary’s continuing capacity for seriousness in the post-documentary moment of Reality TV. Behind the Swiftian Proposals lies an outrageous claim: that the docudrama’s narratives, its theatricalisations of public events, have so democratised a mode of ethical inquiry once the province of the ‘documentary proper’ that it is, not exactly superseded or defunct, but has been usurped in the popular imaginary by the ‘border genres’ of docudrama, docu-soap, Reality TV and mock-documentary.
These, of course, are programme formats that come on to the viewer as if they were at least partially documentary, but about which that viewer is as likely to be sceptical (almost as a matter of course) as not. The formats cover a fiction – non-fiction continuum that runs from the neo-nonfiction of Reality TV (itself a various enough category), through docu-soap and docudrama, to mock-documentary:
Reality TV Docu-soap Docudrama Mock-documentary
Nonfiction Fiction
Often some part of classic documentary discourse is being appropriated for other than classic documentary ends. Or to put it another way, a serious mode of production and accepted codes, conventions and procedures are being used for entertainment purposes. Consider, for example, the notion of research. Many different kinds of film and TV programme in the burgeoning area of popular factual TV now have a research dimension. Almost all need some level of ‘finding out’ (or ‘finding who’) before programmes are made, but the research facilitates a scenario, a part-make-believe, an invention. The tension between the impulse to document and the impulse to dramatise in globalised popular factual television is, I believe, a fundamental trope in border genres.
A proper study of this phenomenon – for it is a phenomenon, the burgeoning of this quasi-documentary activity is nothing less – is ultimately a book length project. It will of necessity analyse the structuring of a variety of popular factual and quasi-factual programmes like Big Brother, and it will be of necessity a work of several hands. I have been working on this with Jane Roscoe (whose work on mock-documentary will be reviewed in the next issue of this journal); we hope over the next year to consolidate the project and take it beyond this current provisionality. Our focus will be on the following:
* narrative, and the overt and covert structuring through formatting and editing that makes for ‘drama’, broadly understood, in this area of production
* presentation of Media-Self, highlighting ’embellished’ characterisation (by which means an observable character trait is emphasised and then ‘developed’, often in the classical Aristotelian manner)
* contrasts between Acted-Self and Media-Self (i.e. presentation of Self by actors, non-actors, ‘actants’)
* the moments of conflict, resolution, catharsis and closure that tend to result from what I call below ‘Aristotalitarianism’ in a broad range of TV programming
* the effect of all this on available readings of mise-en-scène – fully as constructed, fully as ideologically complex at the popular end of the spectrum as it is in the most knowing high-end TV drama.
* audiences, empathy, direct involvement and effects on the public sphere
* developing modes of dramatisation in new media.
Taken altogether, the programme formats in which we are interested are the ‘Not-documentaries’, to risk an even more outrageous coinage. Ever more knowing at all levels, they manufacture collisions between the ‘random real’ of the documentary and the planned, rehearsed, action of the drama: such collisions are at the root of this turn in TV discourse.
Each Thesis and Proposal is accompanied by a ‘Commentary’, offered just as I have presented them at conferences. Not conventional academic discourses, these – more chatauquas (in the manner of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).
Visible Evidence 2002 – Marseille
SEVEN [formerly FIVE] TEUTONIC THESES ABOUT BORDER GENRES
1] Border Genres have all but obliterated the old documentary evidential – we are in a post-documentary era where ‘Thou shalt Entertain’ is the One Industrial Commandment.
Commentary on Thesis 1
The documentary evidential* provided a seeing-is-believing certainty at the high moment of modernist documentary practice, largely through formal assertion in practice and innocent trust in reception. Sobriety guaranteed authenticity: it was a case of utilising an ethical and aesthetical neue sachlichkeit to Constitute the Nation – in whatever nation state the documentary was being articulated. Documentary works better as adjective than noun, and that the concept of the documentary is now absorbed ‘within the sprawling generic system of television non-fiction’ – this is the moment of the ‘post-documentary'(John Corner). The post-documentary era articulates provisionality and uncertainty, play and self-deprecation; it counts on a knowing audience to understand that truth is always relative, random and contingent. Entertainment guarantees engagement – but at what level?
* What is this ‘documentary evidential’? Is it different from ‘visible evidence’? [Peter Hughes]. My tentative answer: yes, it is different. A developed answer would theorise a paradigm shift in belief in evidence.
2] A mediated-evidential has converted a sober public space into a playful one.
Commentary on Thesis 2
Media public spaces resonate with the ‘nosy sociability’ of Reality TV (John Corner again). The mediated-evidential is widely accepted as either shocking or banal – or both. Whatever, catching people out (or in) is fun – Big Brother may be watching you but it’s only for a laugh. This cultural turn towards the tabloid has seen the rise of ‘popular factual entertainment’ in the UK, Europe, the Old Empires and the USA. Do the new forms re-configure the public? If so, how are nations (or rather nations-with-in-nations) being re-constituted? To what extent is the new factual cultural capital transnational? The place of ‘the national image in the international imaginary’ (John Caughie) is the crux for the 21st century – representation or representative?
3] Factual TV is the primary site of a series of vital cultural arguments, often expressed as binaries.
Commentary on Thesis 3
The new public sphere (Jon Dovey) is full of binarised argument and its accompanying performative strategies: private v. public; elitist v. democratic; old fashion v. new fashion; access v. surveillance; the disciplinary social v. the personal libertarian. Instead of certainties expressed collectively, we have attitudes struck personally. A more (and increasingly) performative society accustomed to striking attitudes tends to fragment political and ethical discussion. Is it still in our* hands to counter this?
* Who is this ‘we’? [Peter Hughes]. My thoughts: Audience? Educators? Programme/policy makers? My tentative answer: all these.
4] In the 21st Century: ‘Artistotalitarianism’ in old media like TV; ‘randomness rocks’ in the new web-cam worlds (where ‘story arcs’ are passé).
Commentary on Thesis 4
The term ‘Aristotalitarianism’ was coined by the English dramatist Timberlake Wertenbaker at a conference in Birmingham in 1997. The idea that ‘randomness rocks’ and that the web doesn’t need story arcs comes from a Doonesbury cartoon I first saw in 2000. Wertenbaker meant academics and their theories, neither of which she cared for. I’m appropriating it and sending it back. I’m indicating TV and its dominant Aristotelian dramatic structures. ‘TV is soaked in narrative’ [Doug Pye]. Narrative has often been seen as a binary – either enabling (giving structure to the formless) or imposing (the tyranny of Storyworld v. the flux and complexity of Realworld). ‘Narrative imbues time with historical meaning’ (Bill Nichols). Without a story, audiences are adrift like Pip the cabin boy in Moby Dick – bobbing between eternities of time and space.* In web-cam observation, one part of the C20 documentary project is apparently (and ironically) realised – as Mike Doonesbury’s daughter Alex knew all too well: the historic promise to document minutely and without recourse to structure. If moments structure narrative (and lived experience?) web-cam reminds us of the continuous allegorical nature of time [Alan Read]. Randomness makes documenting and structuring inimical procedures. What are the consequences for the socially-engaged, the ethically informed, if ‘reality’ (always partly a moral dimension) is structured as melodrama in the old media, (un)structured as an endless outtake in the new?
* Intellectual audiences keen on formalism like this: popular audiences don’t.
5] Law/regulation seeps into a trust/belief vacuum – ‘Applied Ethics’ are the responsibility of the new audience.
Commentary on Thesis 5
Humankind cannot live by regulation alone ([paraphrasing] Brian Winston). The best rules are not rules at all but common acceptances within a culture. When I worked in the theatre, there was only one bad audience – the one that didn’t show up. In the light of research and theory, is it any longer credible automatically to castigate TV audiences for bad taste? New audience research (Annette Hill) asks: what do audiences get from hybrids through the culture’s widespread acceptance of them? In the ‘second order experiences’ offered, what kinds of knowledge and understanding are possible? The emergence of Border Genres has been fun to contemplate aesthetically, but (if the puritan pleasures of sobriety are now prurient pleasures) what is our responsibility as researchers and educators towards a new politics of reception based on ‘confrontations between self and other’ [Janelle Reinelt]? I see a ‘Return to Value’ (John Caughie), and regret the political space we academics vacated when we tried to prove that what we do is a science not a humanity. Humanism lives. OK?
6] There has been a dispersal [dissipation?] of ‘documentarist energy’ with a thousand flowers [weeds?] blooming.
Commentary on Thesis 6
Mainstream documentary (travel, nature, history) is still the DOMINANT factual form for the popular audience (Raymond Williams). Once this had a sober-serious/masculinist appeal for an elite minority. In EMERGENT new factual formats, there is a playful-ironic/feminised appeal for a democratic majority audience. New factual formats retain RESIDUAL elements of old documentary, but forms emerging throughout television in the major industrialised countries may have something to do with feminised patterns of consumption within wider cultures?
Documentary is not collapsing, either under pressure of post-modern doubt/denial or of digital technology/fakery. Is it? Dispersed [dissipated?] into the human scale of drama, the flowers/weeds – the new hybridised ‘not-docs’ – have instead centred some of the epistemological, ethical and political cruxes of the times. Partly this is to do with new accommodations between the literate and the visual and TV has tended historically to value the literate over the visual (John Caughie). The power presently being negotiated rests on Louis Delluc’s concept of ‘photogenie’, a quality of ‘visuality’ equivalent to Brecht’s theatrical ‘gestus’? Images ‘provide experiences which are constitutive of human ethical and political judgements – epistemologically valuable and potentially occasions of ideological resistance’ [Janelle Reinelt].
7] There is a new balance between the explanatory and consolatory function in documentary.
Commentary on Thesis 7
If documentary’s historic Griersonian mission was to explain, entertainment kept creeping in thanks to the likes of Cavalcanti and Jennings. Popular factual entertainment has attracted an audience more by mobilising discourses of entertainment than those of sobriety. In a world with new levels of transnational fear and anxiety, the consoling power of entertainment has exceeded the explanatory impulse. Our worst fears of surveillance returned as ‘World’s Worst Driver’ farce; our worst nightmares of obliteration return as ‘Survivor’.
Since the first repetition of the Zapruder tape of the Kennedy assassination, the visual media have progressively entered this mental landscape whenever a nation-constituting trauma has occurred. In the USA, the Challenger explosion was an example. Will the kamikaze attack on the World Trade Centre outstrip previous disasters in the number of times the images will be repeated and re-seen? The first sign of the trauma in a national consciousness is the repetition of an image; the number of repetitions over time is an indication of the seriousness of the trauma.
Whether the number of repetitions is a factor in the explanation or the consolation, or both, I have yet to decide. I am certain, however, that dramatisations, factual and otherwise, will very soon be offering both to audiences. Much of this is about memory and its uses – accessing memory is memory [Joe Kelleher]?
Post-9/11, white anglophone cultures in particular must beware of what consolation they seek and take in the past? It is all too possible to ‘become trapped by our reverence for World War II as a crusade for freedom’ (Peter C. Rollins).
FIVE [formerly THREE] ‘MODEST PROPOSALS’ ABOUT DOCUDRAMA
1] Docudrama inherited the historic task of Documentary – righting political and ethical wrongs in societies that can never be just (but can sometimes be merciful).
Commentary on Proposal 1
I’m wondering if I’ve given up on the term ‘dramadoc’, much less my clumsy 1998 neologism ‘dramadoc/docudrama’ (in my book No Other Way To Tell It). There is a level at which this form is still a ‘duty-genre’ (Brian Winston) whatever a national TV system’s orientation towards the concept of ‘public service’. Steve Lipkin* and I, researching docudrama in the UK and the USA, have reached the conclusion that convergence between UK ‘dramadoc’ and US ‘docudrama’ is not all about the dumbing down of serious subjects. The best examples (as with C19 melodrama) take a cultural crux or anxiety, structure it around the ‘well-made play’ as a witnessed-evidential, claim it as reconstruction, hope to have it received as a kind of experience. Amongst maker-intentions – however dubious these may be to the ‘Over-Cautious Critick’ (Ben Jonson) – there’s still an element of the dutiful? Even in ‘Disease of the Week’ made-for-TV docudrama?
* Steve Lipkin’s excellent Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice was published this year by Southern Illinois University Press. It is indispensable for an understanding of the modern docudrama. As Lipkin rightly asserts, docudrama’s perennial power inheres in the rhetorical nature of its practices.
2] In a performative culture, narratives will be (preferably) personal – and the personal, of course, is political.
Commentary on Proposal 2
Docudrama consistently offers mass audiences politics and ethics in the form of entertainments, their narratives individualised by Everyperson characters. These modern Morality Plays provide us with a viable platform for political and ethical discussion – if we still want one (this ‘we’ is particularly ‘us’ – drama, media and film studies students and academics). Recent fact/fiction shifts comprise ’emotional laboratories’ [Jon Dovey], in which the ‘complex act of identification, projection, and internalization’ [Janelle Reinelt] can now be found in unusual places (Big Brother? Survivor?). Television drama, ‘it is cut to the measure of character, but always of character as revealed in performance’ (John Caughie) and this is equally so for the inter-generic hybridizations. Since the advent of feminism, the surprise should not be that the personal is the political (and ethical).
3] Docudrama’s narratives are conceived mainly in the first person singular, but the first person plural narrative has not been erased.
Commentary on Proposal 3
Docudrama and journalism have an historic connection – even now. We have a huge responsibility to ensure that certain values in both do not disappear altogether. Amongst these might be: working concepts of ‘fairness’ and the collective/societal; demonstrable, pre-script, research; citing of sources of information in credits (in particular, making clear whether a story is ‘public sphere’ research or a tale told and sold in the market). Merging of old and new media is still available to docudrama through the Internet – on which research could be made public. What worked for the McLibel site could work for disease/crisis of the week (but you’d need more that the help-line number featured in so many docudramas?).
4] Americanised docudrama Claims the Public on occasions like the old British dramadoc.
Commentary on Proposal 4
Particular news events shape contemporary history and society in profound ways. There are certain qualifications for an event and its subsequent dramatisations in whatever medium to reach a level of widespread public significance [Janelle Reinelt]:
1] the originary event must be of sufficient gravity to affect the ‘nation’ (or significant segment of the population seeing itself as this).
2] there is a critical mass of public attention to the event
3] the event can be readily apprehended as narrative (there are protagonists, a structural shape, preliminary – though usually not final – closure).
4] the event will ‘have been perceived by the public as the symbolic staging of other, quotidian, features of their national or local lives – embodying a certain kind of ethical critique of their ways of living.
I think there’s a 5th feature: significance accrues as a result of events, not an event. There is a process of event-accretion. By their very nature these events trigger multiple connections and complex emotional outcomes. Uncontrollable through reason alone, these event-chains find expression in theatricalisations that go beyond the fact. In doing so, these factual-fictions (impossible category!) tell us we can understand.
For example: USA – O J Simpson case; UK – Stephen Lawrence case.
There is a level at which the claim on the public is a performative one. The moment or moments of ‘Actuality Display’, used to intensify the drama, play beyond – into the public sphere. ‘The mixing of the filmed real with the imagined constitutes the very interest of fiction film’ (Charles Warren).
5] To theatricalize public occurrence is to engage in a mode of aesthetic and ethical inquiry.
Commentary on Proposal 5
The Simpson/Lawrence cases mobilised issues of gender, race and class; they focused complex national histories into current emotional laboratories; they signalled the multiple return of the ethically repressed in their national cultures. We watch representations of such cases ‘with a double vision’ (Charles Warren). Borrowing Caughie (borrowing Lukacs!), I would claim that cases like these ‘function…as points of condensation for the social and the historical’. Their performative sphere is the new multi-media agora – in which there are many hucksters, but ultimately only one audience – which reveals itself in the moment of performance (and just after).
Post-9/11, it remains to be seen how the media will cope with the global dimension of the ethically repressed – but before 11 September 2001, this was being represented in (for example) the McLibel website, The Insider, Erin Brockovich, Warriors, the Big Brother web-cam, Michael Moore’s performed activism.
Derek Paget
derek@rid-out.co.uk
2002